"Primo Toccare"
Balletto Teatro di Torino
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
October 14, 2009
by Carol Pardo
Copyright ©Carol Pardo
Skulls and flowers have symbolized the transience of human existence for centuries. But the still life that greeted audience members as they took their seats for "Primo Toccare" presented by the Balletto Teatro di Torino at the Joyce Theater, was not your grandmother's--or your great- great- great- great-grandmother's 17th century vanitas canvas.
For this skull is painted silver and placed artfully among a few stems of lilies, the whole encased in a long Lucite box, by turns display case, altar, reliquary and coffin, all lit from below. Two more such boxes, rotated ninety degrees to resemble shower stalls in a pod hotel, occupy the back corners of the stage. Set against a white floor cloth and backdrop, one could be excused for thinking that death lurked in a really high-end boutique. The appearance fo two thin, blond, long-legged models in the "stalls" midway through the first act only reinforced that supposition. Transience, once the province of nature has here become fashion or style, the province of commerce.
If this first act was white and chic, the second was black and chic. The models reappeared, now on a Lucite platform at center stage, expressionless as ever, gatekeepers of a club located in the nether regions one step from Hell. We're at the door of the most exclusive--and therefore desirable--establishment in the neighborhood. Whether Heaven or Hell is revealed behind that door, we never know.
Choreographer Matteo Levaggi seeks to replicate the contrast and opposition of this black and white universe in his movement vocabulary. In his white world arms and torsos undulate and write, rarely still. Legs stretch and bend. But all these movements outward are ultimately retracted. Each of the eight dancers occupies a very small area and is separated by as much space as is structurally possible from everyone else. It is as though an invisible lattice pattern has been embedded in the floor, and woe to anyone who deviates from it.
The world in black is less linear, more sculptural. Torsos stiffen. Angles, most obviously those of bent elbows, replace fluidity. The dance, heedless of the limitations imposed by sharing the stage with three structures in the first act, is now pushed the sides of the stage, for the most part, in the second. Yet this reduced space does not bring its occupants any closer to each other. As in the first act, no one connects. In this world, moving away is inherent in coming together, like atoms and Brownian motion.
With its theme of transience, its method (contrast and opposition), its own visual world and a movement vocabulary, "Primo Toccare" has the tools to become greater than the sum of its parts. But it never happens. For in spite of a few moments that work, most notably a dance for four men linked in a circle but caught up in their own responses to impending death, rather like Rodin's "Burghers of Calais", the movement vocabulary never develops beyond discreet elements. Nothing builds; it just happens. Perhaps this is a consequence of the choreographer's horror of describing or fixing anything absolutely. Or so the ambiguous program notes would seem to indicate. Add to this a singular lack of rhythmic impulse and the visuals, sets by corpuscrudi and lighting by Marco Policastro, are left to carry the theme and the evening.
